The pizza line moves to Coconut Grove
Plus: a 40-year Marine Stadium deal is on today's ballot, and the Playhouse finally gets to pull permits.
Pizza arrived, the Playhouse cleared its zoning fight, and voters get a say on Marine Stadium today. Here is the week around us.
One of Miami's most beloved pizza spots has opened in Coconut Grove. Miami New Times reports the slices here might be better than ever, which is a big claim about a place that already had a following across town. The Grove has watched plenty of restaurant space turn over lately. A pizzeria arriving with a built-in fan base is a different kind of opening. It brings people who already know what they want before they reach the counter. Expect the first few weekends to be crowded, and expect strong opinions about whether the new location holds up.
Ziggurat wants to be a small, expensive block
PROFILEmiami took a close look at Ziggurat Coconut Grove this week. The Allen Morris Company is developing it with the Espinosa family. The plan holds just 19 ultra-luxury residences, a five-story trophy office building, and roughly 45,000 square feet of retail and dining. There are landscaped pedestrian spaces too, all inside a low-rise design the developers say was made specifically for the Grove. Nineteen homes is a small number. Forty-five thousand square feet of shops and restaurants is not. The retail is the part that will change how the sidewalks around it actually feel.
Twenty years on the streets of West Grove
Sheila Dixon has lived on the streets of Coconut Grove for most of the past 20 years. She is unhoused and unafraid, and she is unconcerned about what anyone thinks of her unconventional life. That includes her own family. West Grove is not a place she passes through. It is home, on her terms, through two decades of change on these blocks. Most stories about people living outside skip straight to the problem and never reach the person. Dixon has outlasted a lot of them, and she has her own account of why she stays.
School is back, and so is the traffic
Miami-Dade public school students went back this week, which means the morning traffic you happily forgot about is back too. The first stretch of any school year is the worst for drive times, so leave earlier than feels necessary. The other half of the news is for parents staring down homework season. The county library system starts free homework help on August 26. Free is the operative word there. It also means the dining room table stops being the place where fractions go to die every evening at seven.
Marine Stadium is on today's ballot
Miami voters decide today whether a private company gets to run Miami Marine Stadium. The question covers a 40-year management agreement between the City of Miami and that company for the waterfront site on Virginia Key. The stadium has been closed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. That is 34 years of a landmark sitting still while everyone argues about it. Forty years is a long time to lock in one answer. If it passes, the next version of the stadium gets shaped by this vote. If it fails, the whole conversation restarts.
The Playhouse can finally pull permits
The Coconut Grove Playhouse is out of zoning limbo. The City of Miami Commission voted unanimously to approve Miami-Dade County's appeal on the project's zoning requests, which clears the county to start permitting Phase 2. The work has to deal with the structural deterioration of the 1926 building and turn it into a modern theatrical venue. GableStage is the successor theater company, and county bond money helps pay for the transformation. No curtain is rising this fall. But permitting is the stage where a stalled project starts producing paperwork instead of hearings, and that is progress here.